Isn’t it about time that we feel bad about masturbating again? I mean, other than a few edging holdouts, how long has it been since jacking was taboo? That yanking your plug or flicking your bean or however you want to do it could risk a judgmental side eye and rejecting shake of the head from St. Peter as you plummet down to hell just for fapping? Or that Onan’s cautionary tale of spilling his seed willy-nilly was evoked just to scare you from rubbing one out? Or evoking Onanism at all, earliest cited in a finger-wagging 1716 London pamphlet pithily named, Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, And All Its Frightful Consequences, In Both Sexes, Considered: With Spiritual and Physical Advice To Those Who Have Already Injured Themselves By this Abominable Practice, which warns jerking off can result in symptoms like ravenous hunger, paleness, pimples, madness, and suicide? (Yes, I went down a wanker Wiki rabbit hole). A long time, I would imagine. Though John Harvey Kellogg’s name might still grace his Corn Flakes, we’ve largely forgotten that bland food was thought to help quell the urges of serial beaters, alongside other nutto nutting prevention theories. But beyond Kellogg’s wacko ideas, what sinful naughty enjoyment have we lost in this process of acceptance?

Thankfully, Ethel Cain offers a return to pleasurable self-gratification guilt in her new heroically impenetrable and admirably alienating experimental-sound-art-piece-in-album-disguise Perverts. Alongside the thrillingly tantalizing title, which caused a tizzy even before its recent release as fans balked at purchasing merch at her live shows emblazoned with the degenerate phrase (I however, wear my Perverts hoodie with defiant deviant pride), the title track opener introduces the tugging theme early with an ominous repeated dead-voiced announcement ringing over hollow winds, whirring, spinning drones, and errant peeps and squeaks: “Heaven has forsaken the masturbator! Heaven has forsaken the masturbator! Masturbator!” It’s as if the listener is either getting hypnotized by some quack with their eyes pried open like A Clockwork Orange to stop touching themselves at a conversion therapy camp or receiving a damned message from above while sitting in Purgatory’s waiting room. And with blaring horror film tones and stark periods of Mica Levi-ish airy abyss as if you’re going to be zapped into flesh paper in a black void alongside Scarlett Johansson’s other suitors in Under the Skin, not even the sighing relief of Angelo Badalamenti synths at the end of the downright frightening, just over 12-minute song will save you. Don’t worry though. As a spooky voice whispers at the end, “It’s happening to everybody.”

Yeah. This isn’t exactly the expected sound for the much-anticipated follow-up to Cain’s widely stanned Preacher’s Daughter. Much, of course, has been made of Cain’s decision to forgo potential mainstream success by releasing a punishing crowd-displeasing EP that features songs like “Pulldrone,” a hushed ASMR manifesto to self-shattering and “the sacred geometry of onanism, of ouroboros, of punishment” (“I am that I was as I no longer am for I am nothing”) that drags out 15-minutes of migraine-inducing hurdy gurdy and violin whining like John Cale having a nervous breakdown, or “Housofpsychoticwomn,” a grandfather clock-ticking, sonogram-throbbing stalker anthem with whispered chants of “I love you” and deep-throated promises and come-ons descending into a cacophony of warbling garbles, gags, and porno moans named after Kier-La Janisse’s horror movie memoir (which itself is named after the US retitling of The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll). These aren’t exactly catchy tunes that get stuck in your head: WRRRRRRRRRRRRRR, WOWOWOWOOWOWOWOW. Sure, Cain could have easily produced another atypical yet digestible alternative pop album imbued with Southern Gothic religiosity and Americana twang that easily fit alongside other dreamily darkly romantic musicians like Lana Del Rey or Nicole Dollanganger. But, that would have been boring. Instead, Perverts makes Ethel Cain, in my eyes, one of the most intriguing musicians working today.

Now, for as much as Obama and the “mother!” crowd loved Preacher’s Daughter, it would be a mistake to label that album as conventional: a concept album masterpiece about doomed romance, sexual violence, murder, and cannibalism, set against the backdrop of a patriarchal Pentecostal family tree as represented by a railing preacher whose rabid voice floats in and out of songs. Preacher’s Daughter isn’t completely divorced from the vibrating void where Cain would eventually lead brave listeners on Perverts. Buried under its more comprehensible guitars and drums lie subtle layers of ambient sound, which account for its alluringly ethereal atmosphere, revealing Cain’s influences like Grouper or Hillary Woods found on her, at one time, regularly curated playlists (which have introduced me to a lot of new music). Perverts rids itself of most of these traditional trappings, swapping them for rumbling avalanches of distorted guitar, maddened repetitive atonality, chills of ominous whooshes, and floating ghostly vocal yowls, all of which come together perfectly in the haunting instrumental “Thatorchia.”

There are a few exceptions to this gnawing abrasive unease. “Etienne,” though sorrowful, features a warmth absent from the rest of the icy album, which may come from the presence of Bryan DeLeon’s acoustic guitar supporting the piano. Yet this is quickly vanquished if your ears pick up the quiet disturbing concluding sample that speaks of a suicidal boy who runs as fast as he can to try to induce a heart attack on the daily (and starts to like it). The fragile and angelic “Vacillator,” the only track with drums, is the most approachable on the album, that is, if you don’t listen too hard to the lyrics which boast of being able to “make you cum twenty times a day” before trailing into the neurotic rejection of attachment: “If you love me, keep it to yourself.”

Overt religiosity has also not disappeared here, starting with the opening of “Perverts” in which a solo voice belts “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” fracturing into multiple choral voices only to warp like an unspooled cassette. Cain obviously spent her 2024 obsessively listening to Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter’s SAVED! and subsequent Bandcamp release SAVED! The Index as much as I did. Part of me wishes Cain had investigated this hymnal element more, but then Perverts would end up as a Rev. Hayter tribute act (not that I’d complain). Plus, “Nearer, My God, to Thee” marks the nearest the album ever comes to the Lord. There is no grace or acceptance here like the “If it’s meant to be then it will be” on Preacher’s Daughter’s “Sun-Bleached Flies.” Instead, Perverts comes off as an album-long interpretation of what it would be like to be cast out of heaven like Lucifer.

Throughout Perverts, there are references to being a rejected angel or, as on “Pulldrone,” “an angel, though plummeting.” In some songs, this boot from heaven is more understandable like on the mournful, self-flagellating “Punish,” inspired by Cain stumbling on Palm Beach’s Miracle Village, a remote, sequestered neighborhood of sex offenders (which has been the subject of a haunting photo series by Sofia Valiente). Before the arrival of loud guitar thrums, Cain sings, “Only God knows, only God would believe that I was an angel, but they made me leave,” an unbelievably bold set of lyrics given the song’s narrator is likely a pedo, given the reference to Gary Plauché, a father who shot and killed the man who molested his son on live TV. All of which makes the continual swing set squeaking even more menacing. Other descents to hell are chosen (“Cause the devil I know, is the devil I want”), like the opioid nod on Perverts’ “Heroin,” “Amber Waves,” which unravels into a similar wayward guitar strumming as The Velvet Underground classic. Cain is not the only one to equate addiction with a rejection of heaven (here, heaven as love). In fact, Cain is the first musician to dive headfirst into this whole Lucifer theme since Nick Cave was scrawling The Birthday Party’s masterwork “Mutiny in Heaven” in blood. “Mutiny in Heaven” is a bursting-wings speedball of howling fury, a manic, defiant refusal of heaven (“If this is heaven, I’m bailing out!”) in favor of intravenous drug use and derelict trash and rats in paradise. In contrast, Perverts lingers lonesome in the chilly, wind-burned vacuum after being cast out—“I am sure Hell must be cold,” she mutters on “Pulldrone.” This frigidness also lends itself to the general air of anhedonia (consequently also part of Cain’s actual name, Hayden Silas Anhedönia), most obviously articulated in the concluding mutter, “I can’t feel anything,” on “Amber Waves.”

Yet, there is more paradise in hell than we’ve been told. Beyond the euphoric narco catatonia in “Amber Waves,” other moments of pleasure (and self-pleasure) can be found in perhaps my favorite song, the Chelsea Wolfe-like “Onanist” (And we’re back with masturbation!). “Onanist” swells to an operatic feedback racket (“But there, before the grace of God go I, I want to know love. I want to know what it feels like”) before cutting off instantly to a repeated hollow whisper: “It feels….good. It feels good.” Must have been a good wank! I joke but, answering a fan on her Tumblr, Cain labels Perverts as “an erotic project to me personally.” She explains, “All drone music is for me part erotic, part meditative. It’s deeply indulgent and euphoric for me, in different ways for different tracks.” When I first read this, screenshotted on the Ethel Cain subreddit, I tittered. But upon listening to the album more and more (and more), I see it. There is something satisfying about the heightened sensory state of the droning musical repetition—itself kind of masturbatory, no?—and its rupture. It’s like a climax to orgasm or a spellbound fit of religious ecstasy. For the latter, Cain seems to have nailed it. When I saw her play at Central Park’s Summerstage this past summer, she debuted two new songs from Perverts: “Punish” and “Amber Waves.” During the latter, after her encouragement to let the song wash over us, multiple people passed right out, leading the band to stop and restart the song repeatedly. Medic! Now, it could have been the summer heat, the fact that Gen Z seems incapable of taking care of themselves at concerts anymore (drink water for Christ’s sake), or it could have been the consciousness-altering potential of the song itself. I prefer the latter explanation as the entirety of the album is ripe for spiritual syncope. What more of an endorsement could a musician ask for—it’s better than applause!